Coelacanth

Ah I see. I don’t think so, unfortunately. Something like that would definitely be useful, I guess as a browser extension? I wonder if something like that exists…

What’s stopping you?

Inertia is a hell of a thing. Also TikTok has one of the most efficient algorithms of any social media, and I doubt it would be easily replicated. Especially if you’re doing it in the classic Fediverse spirit of trying to be non-invasive, non-addictive, caring for the users’ privacy etc.

Yeah, and that’s really the crux of it. To 90% of people, the content is all that matters. That’s why comments like: “hey, you like TikTok? Why don’t you try Loops instead?” or “Check out Pixelfed, it’s a bit like Instagram!” are unlikely to work. For most people, it’s just a strictly worse version. The same thing but without the content. Why would they downgrade for no reason?

You have to care about something external to the core experience of consuming content to actually be here. That’s why our population at the moment is, well, just us here *gestures around.* You have to care about FOSS, or decentralisation, or anti-corporatism, or really value the more human interactions you get in a smaller setting with fewer bots, or actually enjoy putting in more work and get less served to you by an algorithm.

Most of the people with those values I believe will eventually trickle over here naturally. The rest though, this is a really hard sell for.

If anyone knew, you wouldn’t have to ask. Everyone’d already been here.

It’s an inherent problem with having both users and communities on the same instances, and just how humans tend to operate in general in that we automatically gravitate to others and clump together.

I think it was @rglullis@communick.news who was saying that in an ideal world there would be two types of instances, one for users and one that only served as hosting space for communities. That way you could block or defederate user groups without losing access to entire communities.

Of course, we’re way past the point where reorganization into a structure like that is feasible. But it’s interesting to think about.

That sounds like a great idea, that’s some of the most important information.

Yes, agreed. Wholesome Yuri being banned might be the most outrageous decision of them all on the banlist, for me.

I think Lemmy.zip has a policy to stay federated with as much of the Fediverse as they can, so that might be an option.

In general I tend to recommend smaller, either interest-specifc or local, language-specific instances first, though, as using those lets you actually utilise the /Local feed the way it’s intended.

What’s crazy is they could have simply:

• Apologised
• Explained the intent to reduce toxicity
• Agreed there was a lack of transparency
• Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature

Yes, I think there is genuinely an audience for what he was doing (or something akin to it), and it would genuinely have been a useful onboarding tool for getting a certain type of person to consider dipping their toes in the Fediverse.

But first of all it absolutely has to be separated from the safety/anti-spam filters. Bundling it with those is very malicious.

Second it must be opt-in.

Third, it must clearly say somewhere that “this anti-toxic setting is a curated block list based on my personal preferences”. There should then have been an option to use a personal blocklist instead of the developer default.

And fourth, I guess ideally this type of filter should maybe have been maintained by a somewhat more… well-balanced individual.

It’s definitely funny in an ironic kind of way that Piefed began as at least partly a reaction towards the politics of the Lemmy devs, but ended up themselves doing the very thing they feared (ie: letting politics affect the code). Meanwhile Lemmy still has never suffered from this, as far as I know.

What the fuck is going on with Piefed lately.